Site Mobile Navigation

Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, 89, Historian of Ancient Greece

Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix, a Marxist historian of ancient Greece and Rome whose erudition and sweeping, passionate style won the admiration of colleagues even when they disagreed with his conclusions, died on Feb. 5 at a hospital in Oxford, England. He was three days short of his 90th birthday.

Mr. de Ste. Croix, whose name reflected his family's French Huguenot origins, taught at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1977. He came late to ancient scholarship after practicing law and serving during World War II in the Royal Air Force. His two most praised books did not appear until he was in his 60's and 70's.

In 1972 Mr. de Ste. Croix published ''The Origins of the Peloponnesian War,'' which challenged the view that the war was provoked by Athens. Instead, he lauded Athenian democracy for offering the poor some respite from oppression by the rich and pinned responsibility for the long conflict firmly on the Spartans.

''He revived the pro-Athenian, pro-democratic stance of earlier scholars like George Grote,'' said Victor Bers, a professor of classics at Yale, referring to the noted 19th-century British historian of ancient Greece.

Nine years later Mr. de Ste. Croix published his best-known work, ''The Class Struggle in the Ancient World, From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests,'' an enormous book that swept over the entire course of ancient Greek and Roman civilization, identifying slavery and oppression as central weaknesses.

Mr. de Ste. Croix wrote that the history of antiquity could be seen as a class struggle between workers, primarily slaves, and property owners. He maintained that reliance on slave labor prevented the ancient world from modernizing and in the end undermined the Roman Empire as the supply of new slaves diminished and the exploited lower orders had little reason to resist the advancing barbarians.

''Those who have been chastised with scorpions may hope for something better if they think they will be chastised only with whips,'' he wrote in the book's concluding sentence.

John Matthews, chairman of the Yale classics department, said, ''For de Ste. Croix, the empire was weakened as the supply of new slaves dried up and Romans lost their liberty.''

Reviewing ''The Class Struggle in the Ancient World'' in 1982, Robin Lane Fox, another noted Oxford classicist, wrote, ''This remarkable book has a passion, a personal style and a breadth of interest, based on exact detail, which have not surfaced in British history writing on such a scale for very many years.'' Mr. Fox went on to disagree with almost everything Mr. de Ste. Croix had said.

This was typical of the mixture of awe and dissent with which many historians greeted his work.

''Very few living scholars can rival his range, and none who is competent to judge can challenge the exactitude of his scholarship,'' wrote P. A. Blunt, a former Camden professor of ancient history at Oxford, in a book of essays presented to Mr. de Ste. Croix on his 75th birthday. Still, Mr. Blunt called his conclusions ''highly controversial.''

Glen Bowersock, a professor of ancient history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said: ''He was a controversialist who brought a breath of fresh air to ancient scholarship. Almost everything he said was interesting.''

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Mr. de Ste. Croix was born in the Portuguese colony of Macao on Feb. 8, 1910. His father worked for the Chinese customs office there and his mother was a missionary's daughter, a member of an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect called the British Israelites. The sect believed that the date of Armageddon could be calculated from the dimensions of the great pyramid. One of his aunts had known the Chinese Christian Gen. Feng Yu-hsiang, who baptized whole regiments with a hose-pipe.

His father died when he was 4, and the family returned to England. Geoffrey was introduced to the classics at Clifton College, a private boys' school near Bristol. But he became a lawyer and practiced in Worthing and London.

His political views became increasingly radical during the 1930's, when he embraced Marxism, but he broke with the British Communist Party in 1939. His interest in the ancient world was aroused during the war when he served as an Royal Air Force officer in the Middle East converting radar tracks into intelligible aircraft flight paths.

Entering London University at the age of 37 in 1947 to study classics, he fell under the influence of A. H. M. Jones, one of the greatest ancient historians of his generation. Master and pupil inspired each other, but as Mr. Lane Fox wrote, Mr. de Ste. Croix's writing came to exhibit ''a fire and an explicitness which Jones's books had somehow lacked.''

After teaching at the London School of Economics, Mr. de Ste. Croix was elected a fellow of New College in 1953, at 43, becoming only the second member of the ancient history faculty at Oxford to have been educated at another university. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and awarded a doctorate by Oxford. He became an emeritus fellow of New College in 1977 and an honorary fellow in 1985.

A large man, Mr. de Ste. Croix had been a distinguished tennis player in his youth, good enough to play the center court at Wimbledon in 1929.

His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1959 he married Margaret Knight. She survives him along with two sons.

He also wrote about aspects of the ancient world almost totally neglected by other historians, including accounting standards and attitudes toward debt and credit.

An inveterate polemicist, a loathing for Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church, which he felt had been a source of intolerance and cruelty since the days of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert.

This led him to explore various aspects of the early Christian church from a critical point of view, especially its attitudes toward women. It also led to his refusing to enter New College Chapel and to his scandalizing believing students by denouncing God, whom he usually referred to by the Hebrew name Yahweh.